Greece Day and Night

Equities start the day higher as I attempt to go an entire recap without using the word crude. SH@#$#@. Well, so much for that, I had high hopes I’d be able to do it. Back in my day, when we used to walk to school and not have our parents call us an Uber and demand a text from the teacher when little Izzy arrived, we used to talk about Greece nonstop. That was the hot jam because when banks were quaking on the shores of the Aegean Sea you just had to sell your SBUX. I mean people will for sure stop buying coffee if a $85mm market cap bank filled with olive oil deposits goes under. Greece day and night, Greece would either rip the market 2% or hammer it for 3, it was fun times. Well I guess 5 years of one topic was enough (was it 5 or 6? felt like a hundred) so we’ve moved on to obsessing about Texas Tea, black gold, petroleum distillate, fossil oils. Never mind earnings or the Fed or sentiment or valuations, the price of dead dinosaur remnants rules with an iron fist. I’m chalking this whole thing up to the fact that there really isn’t anything else to talk about. The whole rate hike thing is priced in so that’s out. It’s 52 degrees in the Midwest so I can’t whine about the weather. The Government isn’t doing anything stupid like threatening default or not paying its bills so we got nothing there. Valuation and price multiple is esoteric and subject to the whims of sentiment so meh. What’s left? What can a market, whose sole purpose in life is to worry, worry about other than a black tarry substance that is used to make overpriced hunks of metal move? Speaking of worry, can you imagine what you are feeling the moment before they let go? ZERO chance I’d do this.

After the open it felt like a holiday trading session for the first time all month. None of this swinging around in 1% increments because people think energy is the death of the bull market. No Fed speakers and no Economic data to mull over so let’s goto the leaderboard and make fun of someone. MW fell 17% after earnings and I bet they don’t like the way their stock looks, in fact I guarantee it. It appears the Jos A Bank “buy one suit get 14 free plus an iPhone and a TSLA” acquisition is like trying to digest a hippopotamus. This was a $70 stock in June, in fact you could say the chart of Mens Wearhouse looks a lot like oil! What else. HPY and GPN are circling each other, GPRO rose 11% because someone thinks they would look good on Cupertino’s campus, and CMG bounced 4% because nothing goes down in a straight line. Losers were FSLR, WYNN, ES, DOW, and CIEN. Speaking of the past, remember when FSLR used to go down literally every freaking day? I think it was in 2011 yea? It would be on the “biggest losers” list more than Charlie Brown and Fruitcake. So it was a quietish morning and by lunch we sat on 2,059 up 60 bps while crude hovered around $37 a barrel. I swear the first thing I do when I wake up now (other than push the slobbering dog off me) is check the price of oil. It’s weird how that stuff develops over time right? The first thing to check in the morning has gone from 1) Greece to 2) AAPL to 3) Treasuries to 4) Greece to 5) Crude oil. There’s always that one thing…ALWAYS. Have I mentioned how awesome this Christmas Song is? So good. This one too…unmatched.

The afternoon featured a selloff from the highs and a close at 2,052, up 47bps. Why the selloff? Because there was really no reason for the rally, so it just kinda fell on itself like a wet soufflé. I assume, minus some kind of OPEC event, that tomorrow will be a snooze a thon. Only 14 trading days left this year and one of them is a half day. If we didn’t have this crude volatility I have no idea what would be moving the market right now because it’s the ONLY story we have at. And don’t tell me the Fed because that one is priced in. So yea, I guess until year end all you need to know is the price of a barrel of oil because that’s what’s moving your savings account around.

Final Score: Dow +47bps, S&P500 +23bps, Nasdaq +44bps, Rus2k +28bps

News Highlights:

Succinct Summation of the Day’s Events: Quiet, fairly aimless price action. Crude seemed to take a back seat to an oversold bounce.

You know the hard part about investing? Other than all of it? What you have to go thru to get the big winners: “Nine of the ten biggest winners this decade were all cut in half. Granted, the S&P 500 was as well, but the point is that even the best stocks gave investors plenty of sleepless nights.”

These are the kinds of things you see at a TOP: “For the first time ever, San Francisco Federal Credit Union has created a home loan product that offers up to 100% financing. Created by San Franciscans for San Franciscans who are fed up with paying ridiculous rents, POPPYLOAN is a game-changing solution that can significantly reduce the down payment needed to make your dream of home ownership a reality”.

Adult gift giving does indeed stink: “Nevertheless, we partake in the grand charade every year. Unwanted gifts are exchanged, Academy Award-worthy shows of thanks are displayed, somebody balls up the wrapping paper and gives it to the dog to systematically devour, we brunch, the dog quietly passes gas in the corner, we nap off the brunch, we dim the lights on the Christmas tree, we pack it all up for next year. What is supposed to be a wholly pleasant aspect of the holidays has become laborious and play-acted; the world’s lowest-stakes murder-mystery party. But it doesn’t have to be this way.” Gift Cards Clark….the gift that keeps on giving the whole year round. That they do Edward…that they do